Ask Eric: Questions & Answers

March 15, 2010 – submitted by Tom Weidner of Utah, USA

Question: I've used HFI for years now, and consider you THE source for UX information.

I've seen a lot of blogs recently advocating that web designers move from 800 to 1024 as a basic web design width "standard".

Am I missing something? Who cares whether 800 width screens are more or less prevalent than 1024 width screens? For over a decade now, I've used WINDOWS (not just Microsoft, but Apple and any other WINDOWS based UI), so that I can have more than one activity on my screen at a time!

This obviates the need to decide what a "good" web site width should be based on screen characteristics, doesn't it?

It seems to me like the more I try to cram onto a web page (in terms of design width), the less web users will like how it behaves inside a (possibly small) WINDOW.

Have you published any studies on the topic of optimal web width, that don't rely on arguments having to do with the size of a screen? I think those arguments are bogus, given the prevalence of windows in the user space. After all, Web pages are typically viewed in a window, not on a full screen.

Eric's response:The decision on screen resolution is similar to hundreds of other tradeoff decisions we make. Think of it as design for the greater good (or more accurately the greater profit). The increase in low resolution netbooks swings things a bit back toward low resolution, but that is only for personal computing. For professional applications we are targeting 1024x768 as the minimum. For more personal applications we need to consider carefully the tradeoff based on context of use. Just how many people are going to be 800x600? And we need to know that designing for a low resolution definitely makes things worse for people on high resolution screens. So we don't want to impair 95% just to accommodate 5%.

The other thing is we can use liquid pages to make degradation to low resolution less painful. By coding to make the page squeeze elegantly you can make things tolerable for the low res folks.

Comment from Tom Weidner
Your response is much appreciated, but reinforces my contention that this dialog is greatly misunderstood among web designers.

The argument in most of the blogs is that physical screen resolution dictates what "good" web page width should be; that since physical screen resolution has gone predominantly from 800 width to 1024 width recently, that somehow that means "good" web page width should now exceed 800.

In fact, screen resolution has nothing to do with "good" web page width. How many windows appear on any particular users physical screen and the width of each one is generally unknowable, and has little to do with physical screen resolution. The whole idea of "overlapping windows" is to be independent of actual physical screen resolution. So, how can physical screen resolution dictate "best" web page width?

Eric: Oh, because most people with moderate screen resolution surf with full screen browser. And so you do have to optimize for that.